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Spelling "Accidental" Without A-I

  "AI doesn’t make mistakes," says the hypothetical author who ships off their hard-labored manuscript to a discount editing service. "It has better grammar and spelling and punctuation and is faster and cheaper than a human editor. And no errors, that's what does it for me. I bought a book and there's a obvious typo in it! AI wouldn't do that." Maybe that's true, for a loose definition of "mistake." If it rewrites your text and phrases, is that a mistake? If it corrects intentional dialect and character grammatical errors, is that a mistake? "Yes and yes," I say after these clever leading questions. "Assuming it would do an equivalent job as a trained, experienced human was the original mistake, the ur-goof  in this comedy. Editing is not spell checking, it's not applying normalized grammar rules, and it's not pureeing the life out of prose to convert it into visual baby food, textureless and uniformly bland. ...
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(I Can't Get No) Validation

It's lonesome in the muck. Or perhaps I should say  in the slop  as that's the tide indie authors are battling now. It's not exclusively indies, but indie creatives of all types are the Bellwether of Bad News. The ink is barely dry on the Shy Girl AI controversy before a Canadian legislator Bill Oliver decided to not do his own homework before standing up and giving his book report, prompt and all, out loud, before cameras and constituents. Whoopsie. Full confession, I work in tech for my day job, and I'm using this tech on a daily basis. The standard that I'm holding myself to is to keep it away from "art" and more generally, creativity. I am fine(ish) using the tools to perform grueling scut work and tedious, unrewarding technical chores. If my career placed me in a kitchen, AI would be relegated to the washing-dishes and emptying-the-trash duties, the necessary, messy side-effects of serving humanity. It doesn't get to cook, it doesn't invent ...
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Final Week of the Smashwords Summer Sale

 Both the ebooks of  The Fall and Rise of @TheRealJoyG  and  Trouble  are discounted exclusively at Smashwords this month, along with many other deals from many other indie authors. Amazon isn't picking this up, it's solely through this one vendor. Load up your reader or phone while the getting's good! 🧩🦏 
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Magic Practice

It began with an old man, mean books, and a giant bird. I'm still discovering the rest. My youngest child gifted me with a pack of Narata storytelling cards some years ago, which are one of many prompt-generating products out there. I used them to come up with the core ideas behind my current WIP, and from that seed, a strange and twisted tree grew... and that's cool, because I'm a fan of strange and twisted. And funny. As I mentioned in the previous post , Big Serious Work often gives way to Leavened With Humor. I'm not able to fight it, so I have learned to embrace it. What I'm also learning is the act of enlargement, growth, expansion... how to take that man/books/bird core idea and write out a narrative that is interesting, doesn't explain too much, but also doesn't hide too much, if that makes any sense. Writing that delights me is a magic trick, a diverting of expectations and attention with flourishes and misdirections that still results in delight. ...
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First and Worst

Oh, the first draft. So many events in publishing test an author's soul, but none as brutal as staring at the face of a first draft. Someone collected a set of quotes, possible apocryphal, on Reddit recently, and they are universal in their apologetic, just-stick-it-out tone of the first draft. I'm wrestling with my own right now, flailing around in the weeds to try to shape the vision I hold in my head to approximate words on the page. Someone took mild issue with the collection, and suggested that "Just [write] a solid, good, first draft" was the solution. I took mild issue with that advice, because Reddit: "Just" is doing a lot of lifting in that sentence. As is "solid." And, for that matter, "good." Write a saggy, floppy, rambling, get-it-down first draft, shelve it for a month, and then come at it sideways with a red pen and a suit of armor is more my style. I can't shape the small until I've completed th...
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We Named the Blog "Indie"

I'm not sure when the rebrand took place, probably in the lean decade and a half between my own publishing attempts, but "self-published" became "indie publishing" (and "vanity presses" often became "hybrid.") No matter the branding, it's living DIY mindset and aesthetic and knowing and avoiding pitfalls. In 2012, when I first tried, the book landscape was very different. Amazon was still dominant, of course, but Barnes & Noble was a competitor, and truly indie distribution options were limited. It's been a while, but I think I chose B&N and Smashwords for an eBook, and CreateSpace for the print editions. I remember being of the "anything but Amazon" mindset, which now feels quaintly progressive. They were always the 500 pound gorilla in the middle of the living room, but it was easier to pretend to ignore them. Here in 2026, Amazon has swept up CreateSpace, Draft2Digital long-since absorbed Smashwords, and Barnes an...
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Trouble Has Landed

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 The paperback edition is available now, through the usual sources. Updated links are on the Books page of the main site . Thank you for reading! 🧩🦏    
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